Presence 15 (3) Special Issue on Virtual Heritage 1 Enhancing Virtual Reality with Artificial Life: Reconstructing a Flooded European Mesolithic Landscape Eugene Ch’ng and Robert J. Stone Human Interface Technologies Team Department of Electronic, Electrical & Computer Engineering, School of Engineering The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, B15 2TT, United Kingdom exc390@bham.ac.uk and r.j.stone@bham.ac.uk Abstract The fusion of Virtual Reality and Artificial Life technologies has opened up a valuable and effective technique for research in the field of dynamic archaeological reconstruction. This paper describes early evaluations of simulated vegetation and environmental models using decentralized Artificial Life entities. The results demonstrate a strong feasibility for the application of integrated VR and Artificial Life in solving a 10,000 year old mystery shrouding a submerged landscape in the Southern North Sea, off the east coast of the United Kingdom. Three experimental scenarios with dynamic, “artificial” vegetation are observed to grow, reproduce and react to virtual environmental parameters in a way that mimics their physical counterparts. Through further experimentation and refinement of the Artificial Life rules, plus the integration of additional knowledge from subject matter experts in related scientific fields, a credible reconstruction of the ancient and, today, inaccessible landscape may be within our reach. 1 Introduction Virtual Reality (VR) has been applied to many areas in the past to solve real-world problem domains. Over the past decade, as VR technology gained popularity in the domain of archaeology, networks of international organizations, notably the Virtual Heritage Network (VHN, 2000) have evolved to promote the use of VR for the education, interpretation, and preservation of cultural and natural heritage (as defined in (UNESCO, 2004)). Virtual Heritage sets out to “designate the use of computer-based interactive technologies to record, preserve, or recreate artifacts, sites and actors of historic, artistic, religious and cultural significance and to deliver the results openly to a global audience in such a way as to provide formative educational experiences through electronic manipulations of time and space” (Stone, 2000). Virtual Reality for Heritage is limited only by our imagination and effort in recreating worlds from the past and present that are either protected, such as Stonehenge (Stone, 1998), or inaccessible due to limitations of time and space such as the Shotton River Valley (named after a famous British geologist (Robson, 2004)). Recently the Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS, 2004) acquired seismic datasets from the Southern North Sea (Figure 1). Initial investigations revealed a large river valley from an ancient landscape dating back 10,000 to 7,000 years. At 600 meters wide with an observed length of 27.5km, the river valley displays a trend of North West to South West. This significant finding of archaeological value raises important questions regarding the migration of ancient hunter-gatherer populations from mainland Europe. These explorers may have tread upon the landscape or even populated the regions of the river valley just before the flooding of the North Sea that drove settlements away and wiped living organisms off the once thriving landscape. The datasets originally gathered for oil prospecting were handed to the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity at the University of Birmingham (UK) and, with the help of the high-end computing facilities, researchers were able to investigate the basic topography of the river valley in contours and 3D voxel volumes. The additional identification of ancient lakes and marshes prompted the initiation of the North Sea Visualization Project (NSVP) in collaboration with the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering.